DART MISSION: WHAT IT ACCOMPLISHED AND WHY IT MATTERS

DART Mission: What It Accomplished and Why It Matters

DART Mission: What It Accomplished and Why It Matters

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DART Mission: On Sept 26 NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully slammed into a distant asteroid at hypersonic speed on Monday in the world’s first test of a planetary defense system, designed to head off a possible doomsday meteorite collision with Earth. Humanity’s first attempt to alter the movement of an asteroid or any supernal body played out in a NASA webcast from the mission operations center outside Washington, D.C., 10 months after DART was launched.
The DART, launched by a SpaceX rocket in November 2021, made maximum of its passage under the guidance of NASA’s flight directors, with control handed over to an separate onboard navigation system in the final hours of the travel. Monday evening’s point impact was watched in near real-time from the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

Cheers erupted from the control room as second- by-second images of the target asteroid, captured by DART’sonboard camera, grew more prominent and eventually filled the television screen of NASA’s live webcast just before the signal was lost, certifying the spacecraft had crashed into Dimorphous. DART’s supernal target was an oblong asteroid” moonlet” about 560 feet (170 meters) in radius that orbits a parent asteroid five times larger called Didymos as part of a binary brace with the same name, the Greek word for twofold.

Neither object presents any sure-enough danger to Earth, and NASA scientists said their DART test couldn’t cause a new hazard by mistake. The DART mission was designed to show that it is possible to deflect an asteroid by hitting it with a spacecraft. The DART mission was successful in its goal, and it is hoped that this will be the first of many such missions. The DART mission is important because it shows that we can defend ourselves from asteroids, and it gives us a better understanding of how to do so.

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